This is from 1988 — it was my speech when I ran for president of the International Student Organization at Longwood High School.
I even had buttons made up. I was quite the extrovert back in those days (and a nerd too, in case you hadn’t noticed). But I wasn’t exactly Marcus Antonius, even if I wanted to be.
Note the use of a dot matrix printer! 😀
This is Longwood High School in New York, circa … 1988? 1989?
No, I have no idea why my pants are pulled halfway up my chest.
Thanks to alumna Carrie Harbach Schor for passing along this news clipping.
Update: I never got high in high school, but my pants sure as *&^@ did.
I indeed took a typing class at Longwood High School in New York, circa … 1989 or so. We used actual typewriters, as though they weren’t doomed to be obsolete soon after.
Typing was supposed to be a class that the shrewd kids took. It had a reputation for being boring — but you’d supposedly thank yourself later, because you’d be leagues ahead of your peers either at college or in the workplace.
Oh, God, it was boring. You never typed out anything interesting like a story about monsters or an Edgar Allan Poe poem. It was always some inane, saccharine letter about children enjoying a summer camp. That was one of the most excruciatingly tedious things my mind had ever encountered — made even more so by the fact that I had to navigate it at a snail’s pace. (Even by the end of this class, I remained a terrible typist. But you guys know that already know that … youve sene my various typpos right her at this blog, right?)
I can’t believe I still remember that damn summer camp letter. It’s funny how the mind works. I guess that letter will haunt me until the end of my days. Stupid kids and their stupid fictional laughter.
(Via the Do You Remember When Facebook page.)
I’m not sure how you arrived at that decision, but I wish you all luck with it. Even if you are getting too old for me.
I got some more amazing news today, guys — Newsday printed my most recent letter to the editor, about the word “overeducated” being thrown around by our national politicians. You can find it right here in yesterday’s paper.
My letter was edited down considerably for length, but I am still quite honored to see something I authored appear in this major regional newspaper. Newsday is the America’s 10th largest paper, and the third largest in New York State. It has a weekday circulation of 437,000 in the New York metropolitan area, and reaches nearly half of the households on Long Island.
I really am grateful to Newsday’s editorial staff for deciding that my letter merited the attention of its readers.
It is currently circulating on Facebook. (No pun intended.)
I actually met Maya Angelou (or attended one of her readings, really) when I was a student at Longwood High School. Our English class took a field trip to Suffolk Community College in New York in … 1988 or 1989, I think. One of my alums piped in on Facebook to say he remembers too.
Rest easy, Charles Bassett Anderson. Even nearly three decades later, his students in New York remember him fondly and are saddened by his loss.
Mr. Anderson passed away on January 16. You can find his obituary at The Long Island Advance, where he was a contributor. (He retired from Longwood High School in 1991, according to the Advance, just a year after I and my friends were fortunate to have him as a teacher. He then became a professor, first at Suffolk Community College and later at Hofstra University).
Mr. Anderson was a superlative educator, and was responsible for some of my best memories of high school. He was a good, kind, temperate man who was easy to interact with, despite teaching a demanding course of study. (His 1989-90 Advanced Placement English class was rigorous, and was designed to fully prepare public high school students for the far greater demands of college.) Mr. Anderson taught me, among other things, that academia could be both challenging and (sometimes bizarrely) fun — and that we could demand a lot from ourselves and enjoy ourselves at the same time.
This was our class picture. It was really making the rounds a couple of months ago when one of my classmates uploaded it to Facebook.
This picture was taken at homecoming game, I think, at Longwood High School in Suffolk County, New York, in the very early 1980’s. This would have been the site of the “old” high school, at the end of Smith Road on Longwood Road, and not the “new” school building to which we moved in the late 80’s.
The furry fella is our school mascot, the Longwood Lion; that off-putting lily-white waif you see is me. (God does not equally bless all children with pleasing appearances.) I think I still remember that gray sweatshirt, and the oversized black digital watch. (In the age before home computers, those cheap little doodads were considered a bit fancy.)
It’s a good thing I wasn’t smiling here. Roughly half my body weight at the time resulted from my oversized teeth and gums, and that was not a pretty thing to look at. My school picture could have redefined the term “Gummi” in a categorically horrible fashion. I looked like somebody had cross-bred a “‘Nilla Wafer” with Ridley Scott’s “Alien.” Or maybe crossbred John Carpenter’s “Village of the Damned” with David Cronenberg’s “The Fly.” I’m serious.
This past Monday marked the 35th Anniversary of MTV. It aired its first music video, ironically The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” on August 1st, 1981.
That’s a cool answer for a trivia question, but it’s not actually a memory for a lot of people. Not everybody had premium cable packages back then. My family didn’t. And if we’d had fancy cable channels like that, I’d have been far more thrilled to get Showtime or the legendary HBO. (We called the latter “Home Box” back in the day.)
The first time I laid eyes on MTV was at a friend’s house, and it seemed weird to a fourth grader. I thought it was an inscrutably dumb idea — why did we need to see the music being played? That seemed like something appropriate only for fanatical music fans. In my child’s mind, I pictured them as the weird, overly nostalgic, long-haired men who purchased those “Hits of the 60’s” cassettes that were so often advertised on non-primetime television.
I only gave it a glance; my friend and I then went on to play in the woods, maybe to build a tree-fort. The 80’s were a different time.
Adults, too, scoffed at “Music Television.” I heard more than one opine, disapprovingly, that “music is meant to be heard, not watched.”
MTV also arrived with little initial fanfare, of course, because nobody knew how big it would be. By the end of the 80’s, even describing it as a cornerstone of popular culture would be an understatement. It was … I dunno … a cultural conduit. It was part of life, if you were a teenager.
By the time I graduated from Longwood High School in the spring of 1990, I was watching it nightly, just like countless other kids. This was arguably MTV’s Golden Age — it would be many years before its inexplicable, universally maligned transition away from music videos to brainless, bread-and circuses”reality shows” and other questionable programming.
The countdown show in the late 80’s was “Dial MTV,” Wikipedia reminds me. (Why do I feel like I remember it being called something else?) I didn’t pay much attention to “120 Minutes,” which focused on alternative music. And that’s weird, because I would go nuts for alternative music when I was bitten by the Depeche Mode bug early in my freshman year of college.
MTV could be found on Channel 25 in my part of Long Island; its sister channel, VH-1, was on Channel 26. I remember thinking of VH-1 as “MTV for old people.” And, by “old people,” I did mean people in their 30’s.
For some reason, I had quite a preoccupation as a teenager with Vee-Jay Martha Quinn. I definitely had Martha on my mind, back then. I’m not sure what was up with that. Looking back, I think she resembled a mild-mannered, nondescript librarian who dressed just slightly cool, maybe because she just got a job at the local high school. Or maybe because she was sneaking up on 30.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 